Monday, December 23, 2013

Veterans of twenty years of empty negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians may too easily dismiss the current talks, led by US Secretary of State John Kerry, as simply more of the same. Yet they are occurring in a dramatically changed political environment. What are the implications for Palestine of the regional upheavals of the past few years? How sincere are Kerry and the EU in their apparent determination to secure an agreement? What would that settlement look like? And what other important trends are emerging that will shape the future trajectory of the conflict?

We've invited a panel of acute analysts and observers of the conflict to summarise the current state of play in Palestine, and where things are headed.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Dept. of History

Lydda, 1948

A city, a massacre, and the Middle East today.

This content is behind a paywall, but this essay is well worth the effort to find a copy. I wish all those having a hard time coping with Palestinians demanding their rights would read this account, by a Jewish Israeli senior correspondent at Haaretz Newspaper and a member of its editorial board, and put themselves in the shoes of Palestinians originally from Lydda.

In his acceptance speech, given at an official Hanukkah
party in New York, Mayor Bloomberg remained true to U.S. Jewish American
politics and thus, before making his speech, cleared his intention to donate
the money to “promote commerce between the people in Palestine and the people
in Israel” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As a Palestinian American businessman on the ground in the
occupied Palestinian territory for twenty years, I did not know whether to
laugh or cry at this seemingly generous announcement. This well-intentioned act
is flawed for several reasons.

First, “commerce between the people in Palestine
and the people in Israel”
is not hindered by lack of funds; it is stifled due to 46 years of Israeli
military occupation, each year of which has been squarely supported by the U.S.
Every single strategic economic resource needed to build Palestine, from water,
land, borders, trade routes, frequencies, airspace, and so much more are 100%
micromanaged by the Israeli military. Until the dirty boot of military
occupation is removed from the necks of Palestinians, joint commerce can only
serve to beautify a status quo which is creeping toward a state of Apartheid,
not peace.

Second, with Israel’s
military occupation and structural discrimination against Palestinians on both
sides of the green line intensifying over the past few years, there is no
appetite in the Palestinian community for more commerce with Israel,
given that Palestine’s economy is
already massively dependent on Israel’s
economy by sheer fact of the military restrictions that Israel
places on Palestinian economic development.

Today, the only appetite in Palestine,
and many corners of the world, is to intensify boycott, divestment and
sanctions on Israel
until Israelis feel the pain of occupation enough to want to end it. This
cost-based approach is being more and more articulated by progressive Jewish
Americans too, as was recently penned by Kathleen Peratis in the Daily Beast’s Open Zion (If
You Want Two States, Support BDS, October 16th,
2013), as well as by enlightened Jewish Israelis such as
journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz (The Iran case proves
it: Sanctions will get Israel to end the occupation, Nov. 30, 2013).

Instead of wasting $1M on trying to promote commerce between
an occupied people and their occupiers, I have a much more constructive
suggestion for Mayor Bloomberg: transfer the funds to the New York-based Jewish
American organization, Encounter.

Encounter was founded by two rabbinical students and has two
rabbis on its board. Jewish American political pundit Peter Beinart recently
mentioned Encounter in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books (The
American Jewish Cocoon, September
26, 2013). Encounter is an amazing group of dynamic Jewish
Americans who are breaking the divide, not by chumming up to the reality of
separation, discrimination, and occupation, but rather by mobilizing Jewish Americans
from all walks of life, with the bulk being rabbinical students and mainstream
Jewish American leaders. The group brings delegations of Jewish Americans - Orthodox,
Conservative and Reform - to the West Bank and engages
them in active listening to hear directly from Palestinian community members
and leaders from the “other” side of the conflict, viewpoints that most have
never heard before.

This is not about normalizing the occupation – far from it.
It is about sharing a reality that most Jews around the world have had
purposely excluded from their education. It goes without saying that I too
learn a lot from engaging the participants.

For nearly six years I’ve been a speaker to these
delegations. As a matter of fact, I usually drop what I’m doing and head to Bethlehem
to participate in the program because I see real education and progress being
made. By looking into the eyes of the participants, even though many may not
agree on much of the politics, I have come to learn that Mayor Bloomberg’s own
Jewish American community can’t stand what they see on this side of the
Separation Wall, if given half a chance to experience it.

Indeed, we in the Palestinian business community can take
care of ourselves, as soon as our economy can breathe freely. In the meantime,
and toward that end, I urge Mayor Bloomberg and those like him to empower those
doing the nitty-gritty, behind the scenes education to enable equality,
freedom, and independence to take root, for all of our sakes.

Thursday, December 05, 2013

It's time to officially accept the reality: A nuclear occupying power like Israel is comfortable in the current setting of negotiations.

By Muhammad Shtayyeh

The decision to accept the two-state solution was not easy for the people of Palestine. Our declaration of independence in 1988 - the acceptance of a State of Palestine on the 1967 border - was a huge and painful concession for the sake of achieving peace with Israel. To this day, we have not seen any such process of compromise on the Israeli side - quite the opposite, in fact. And unfortunately we have seen little in the way of international intervention.

The historic Palestinian compromise has never been matched by any Israeli government. Since 1967, Israel's policy has been guided by one aim: to take as much Palestinian land with the lowest number of Palestinians, while making life so unbearable for Palestinians that they are directly or indirectly forced to leave. This colonization process, a war crime under international law, is the biggest obstacle to achieving the two-state solution, a solution born out of international consensus. The Israeli government is fully committed to this illegal enterprise, de facto rejecting the two-state solution.

Employing empty rhetoric and diversionary tactics, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offers negotiations without parameters and draws attention to Iran. These disingenuous statements continue while his cabinet is split between those promoting the expansion of settlements and those joining demonstrations against the release of Palestinian prisoners.

We are committed not to release details from the negotiating process, but I think my resignation betrays the lack of seriousness on the Israeli side. And it was not an easy decision. When I meet people I always remind them that no one stands to benefit more from peace than the Palestinians - we are the occupied people, after all.

My decision to leave the negotiating table would not have been necessary in the presence of a serious Israeli partner, one that was ready and able to make the decisions needed to prepare Israelis for a final-status agreement with Palestine. We challenge Netanyahu to hold a cabinet vote, with the parties he chose for his government, on ending the occupation that began in 1967 and accepting a sovereign Palestinian state. Netanyahu's inability to support the two-state solution rests not only on his ideological commitment to colonization but also the fact that, if his cabinet voted, it would show itself in favor of an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people.

Twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Israel's behavior has not changed. It's time to officially accept the reality: A nuclear occupying power like Israel is comfortable in the current setting of negotiations. The Israeli government is not pushed to move because of the huge disparity in power between Israel and Palestine and the Israeli lobby's strength with the majority of the U.S. Congress that fully backs the Israeli position.

The success of the Geneva talks over the Iran issue, and the possibility of success for the Syrian issue, makes us wonder why there is no talk about a Geneva–Palestine discussion. We would exchange the current bilateral situation for a multilateral forum where other powers, including Russia, China, the European Union, the Union of South American Nations and the BRICS countries can contribute to a just and lasting peace for Israel, Palestine and the rest of the region.

This proven process would mean the internationalization of the solution. The international community would not only play the role of donor, it would have to be active in implementing resolutions on Israel-Palestine.

To reach a final-status agreement, both Israelis and Palestinians must agree on the endgame. It cannot be denied: This most fundamental requirement for negotiations is missing. An active international role under the framework of a multilateral conference could set and implement requirements and obligations for peace rather than granting impunity to the stronger party so it can violate agreements without any sort of arbitration mechanism.

Everyone but Israel has accepted the formula of a two-state solution on the 1967 borders. All regional blocs agree that the basis for regional stability depends on the end of the Israeli occupation. But as long as Israel continues to be treated with impunity, it will have no incentive to accept the internationally recognized framework for peace.

Israeli policies on the ground continue to reject the historic Palestinian compromise. These policies clearly aim to undermine U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's efforts and put the nail in the coffin of the internationally endorsed two-state solution. This is no longer a secret but the official position voiced by the majority of the Israeli government.

To conclude, Israel is asked to decide whether it wants the two-state solution on the 1967 borders. At the same time, the world must realize that bilateral negotiations are not the answer. If the multilateral framework of the Geneva talks worked elsewhere, why not for Palestine?

Dr. Muhammad Shtayyeh is minister in charge of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, a member of the Fatah Central Committee and a former negotiator in the talks with Israel.

The Iran case proves it: Sanctions will get Israel to end the occupation

The settlements are an all-Israeli project and the boycott can't be limited to them.

It appears that international sanctions work and that a boycott is a tool like no other. Even Israel's prime minister has admitted this; he has called on the world not to ease the sanctions and to even intensify them, and following his lead is the shrill U.S. Jewish lobby.

This being the case, the moral is clear: This is the way to act with recalcitrant states. This applies not only to Iran, where the theory is being proved before our eyes, but with another country that does not obey the decisions of the international community.

Israel has signed the Horizon 2020 agreement for scientific research with the EU barring funding from companies or institutions with ties to the settlements. This is irrefutable proof that a boycott threat works well with Israel, too.

The truth is hard to miss. By signing the agreement, Israel gave a hand to the first official international boycott of the settlements. There is no other way to portray this agreement, even including the special appendix that Israel added in protest. Israel, which passes indecent laws against calls for boycotts against it, surrendered and signed on to boycott terms when it began to be hit in the pocket.

Now we have a limited boycott and a harbinger of things to come. The negotiations over the agreement were conducted by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, whose office is located in the heart of occupied East Jerusalem. For some reason, the EU didn't boycott her for this. Negotiations over funds trickling to the settlements are being conducted with a minister who, according to the entire world, has her office in a settlement on Jerusalem's Saladin Street.

This absurdity reveals the hypocrisy of boycotting just the settlements. Every Israeli organization, institution or authority is somehow involved with what's going on beyond the Green Line. Every bank, university, supermarket chain or medical institution has branches, employees or clients who are settlers. The settlements are an all-Israeli project and the boycott can't be limited to them, just as the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa couldn't be limited to the institutions of apartheid.

There everything was apartheid, and here everything is tainted by occupation. Israel funds, protects and nurtures the settlements, so all of Israel is responsible for their existence. It's unfair to boycott just the settlers. We're all guilty. On the other hand, boycotting all of Israel is likely to morph into the rejection of its very existence, something most of the world justly does not want. Therefore, we should rejoice over the limited boycott even if it is tainted by double standards. We should draw lessons from it.

The success achieved with Iran must become the world's road map in how to end the Israeli occupation and the denial of the Palestinians' rights. The outline is clear. We have had a failed diplomatic effort and decades of the "peace process," the longest in history. We have had endless peace plans buried in drawers, while Israel has continued to build without restraint in the settlements in contravention of the world's position.

So the time has come for sanctions. When these are felt in Israel, only then should an international committee be formed, whether in Geneva, Jerusalem, Oslo or Ramallah, where the world will translate economic sanctions into political achievements.

This worked with Iran, and it will work with Israel and prevent bloodshed. There's no reason to continue the masquerade of peace talks that, with the exception of one American, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, no one takes seriously. Even he will eventually come around because as long as Israelis don't pay a price for the occupation or are blind to it, they won't end it. That's the truth.

The truth is a bitter reality with which no Israeli can be happy. Disconnected from the international reality, most Israelis are convinced that the status quo where the people of one nation lack all rights while the people of another nation enjoy full rights can't continue indefinitely. Maybe this will be the real historic achievement of the negotiations with Iran. It will be the last wake-up call for that sleeping beauty, Israel.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Birzeit University President, Dr. Khalil Hindi, and Applied Information Management's Managing Partner, Sam Bahour, signed a consulting agreement which aims to develop various university assets and services into investment opportunities, which will offer the private sector the possibility to serve the university needs through business ventures.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Concert featuring Palestinian singers on the occasion of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

Special Event co-organized by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).

Announcing a new al-shabaka commentary - 12 November 2013Transforming Our Vision of Palestine Into Reality

A not-so-silent Palestinian majority opposes a peace that brings no justice. This fact underlies Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Sam Bahour's trenchant reality check for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's push for a two-state solution. Bahour disposes of the myths still shrouding the failed negotiations and calls for economic investment of the right kind on the path to freedom, justice and equality.

Imploding the Myth of Israel

Posted on Nov 4, 2013

By Chris Hedges
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel's most enlightened and educated citizens—1 million of them—have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America's democracy.

And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories. Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country's parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.

There are very few intellectuals or writers who have the tenacity and courage to confront this reality. This is what makes Max Blumenthal's "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel" one of the most fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal burrows deep into the dark heart of Israel. The American journalist binds himself to the beleaguered and shunned activists, radical journalists and human rights campaigners who are the conscience of the nation, as well as Palestinian families in the West Bank struggling in vain to hold back Israel's ceaseless theft of their land. Blumenthal, in chapter after chapter, methodically rips down the facade. And what he exposes, in the end, is a corpse.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, including months in Gaza and the West Bank. I lived for two years in Jerusalem. Many of the closest friends I made during my two decades overseas are Israeli. Most of them are among the Israeli outcasts that Blumenthal writes about, men and women whose innate decency and courage he honors throughout his book. They are those who, unlike the Israeli leadership and a population inculcated with racial hatred, sincerely want to end occupation, restore the rule of law and banish an ideology that creates moral hierarchies with Arabs hovering at the level of animal as Jews—especially Jews of European descent—are elevated to the status of demigods. It is a measure of Blumenthal's astuteness as a reporter that he viewed Israel through the eyes of these outcasts, as well as the Palestinians, and stood with them as they were arrested, tear-gassed and fired upon by Israeli soldiers. There is no other honest way to tell the story about Israel. And this is a very honest book.

"Goliath" is made up of numerous vignettes, some only a few pages long, that methodically build a picture of Israel, like pieces fit into a puzzle. It is in the details that Israel's reality is exposed. The Israeli army, Blumenthal points out in his first chapter, "To the Slaughter," employs a mathematical formula to limit outside food deliveries to Gaza to keep the caloric levels of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside its open air prison just above starvation; a government official later denied that he had joked in a meeting that the practice is "like an appointment with a dietician." The saturation, 22-day bombing of Gaza that began on Dec. 27, 2008, led by 60 F-16 fighter jets, instantly killed 240 Palestinians, including scores of children. Israel's leading liberal intellectuals, including the writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, blithely supported the wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians. And while Israelis blocked reporters from entering the coastal Gaza Strip—forcing them to watch distant explosions from Israel's Parash Hill, which some reporters nicknamed "the Hill of Shame"—the army and air force carried out atrocity after atrocity, day after day, crimes that were uncovered only after the attack was over and the press blockade lifted. This massive aerial and ground assault against a defenseless civilian population that is surrounded by the Israeli army, a population without an organized military, air force, air defenses, navy, heavy artillery or mechanized units, caused barely a ripple of protest inside Israel from the left or the right. It was part of the ongoing business of slaughtering the other.

"Unarmed civilians were torn to pieces with flechette darts sprayed from tank shells," Blumenthal writes. "Several other children covered in burns from white phosphorous chemical weapon rounds were taken to hospitals; a few were found dead with bizarre wounds after being hit with experimental Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs designed to dissolve into the body and rapidly erode internal soft tissue. A group of women were shot to death while waving a white flag; another family was destroyed by a missile while eating lunch; and Israeli soldiers killed Ibrahim Awajah, an eight-year-old child. His mother, Wafaa, told the documentary filmmaker Jen Marlowe that soldiers used his corpse for target practice. Numerous crimes like these were documented across the Gaza Strip."
By the end of the assault, with 1,400 dead, nearly all civilians, Gaza lay in ruins. The Israeli air force purposely targeted Gaza's infrastructure, including power plants, to reduce Gaza to a vast, overcrowded, dysfunctional slum. Israel, Blumenthal notes, destroyed "80 percent of all arable farmland in the coastal strip, bombing the strip's largest flour mill, leveling seven concrete factories, shelling a major cheese factory, and shooting up a chicken farm, killing thirty-one thousand chickens."

"Twelve [years old] and up, you are allowed to shoot. That's what they tell us," an Israeli sniper told Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass in 2004 at the height of the Second Intifada, Blumenthal writes. "This is according to what the IDF [Israel Defense Force] says to its soldiers. I do not know if this is what the IDF says to the media," the sniper was quoted as saying.

The 2008 murderous rampage is not, as Blumenthal understands, an anomaly. It is the overt policy of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who advocates "a system of open apartheid." Israel, as Blumenthal points out, has not lifted its state of emergency since its foundation. It has detained at least 750,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 women, in its prisons since 1967. It currently holds more than 4,500 political prisoners, including more than 200 children and 322 people jailed without charges, Blumenthal writes, including those it has labeled "administrative detainees." Israel has a staggering 99.74 percent conviction rate for these so-called security prisoners, a figure that any totalitarian state would envy.

Blumenthal cites a survey of Jewish Israeli attitudes on the Gaza bombing, known as Operation Cast Lead. The survey, by Daniel Bar-Tal, a political psychologist from Tel Aviv University, concluded that the public's "consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering." Bar-Tal tells Blumenthal "these attitudes are the product of indoctrination." And Blumenthal sets out to chronicle the poison of this indoctrination and what it has spawned in Israeli society.

The racist narrative, once the domain of the far right and now the domain of the Israeli government and the mainstream, demonizes Palestinians and Arabs, as well as all non-Jews. Non-Jews, according to this propaganda, will forever seek the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Holocaust, in which Israeli victimhood is sanctified, is seamlessly conflated with Palestinian and Arab resistance to occupation. The state flies more than 25 percent of Israeli 11th-graders to Poland to tour Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps a year before they start army service. They are told that the goal of Arabs, along with the rest of the non-Jewish world, is another Auschwitz. And the only thing standing between Israelis and a death camp is the Israeli army. Israeli high schools show films such as "Sleeping With the Enemy" to warn students about dating non-Jews, especially Arabs. Racist books such as "Torat Ha'Melech," or "The King's Torah," are given to soldiers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, the authors of the 230-page book, inform soldiers that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and may have to be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [of Noah] ... there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira and Elitzur write. The rabbis claim that under Jewish law "there is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."

These narratives of hatred make any act of deadly force by the Israeli army permissible, from the shooting of Palestinian children to the 2010 killing by Israeli commandos of nine unarmed activists on the Turkish boat the Mavi Marmara. The activists were part of a flotilla of six boats bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The Israeli propaganda machine claimed that the small flotilla was a covert terror convoy. Never mind that the Mavi Marmara was in international waters when it was attacked. Never mind that no one on the boat, or any of the five other boats, was armed. Never mind that the boats were thoroughly searched before they left for Gaza. The Israeli lie was trumpeted while every camera, video and tape recorder, computer and cellphone of the activists on board was seized and destroyed—or in a few cases sold by Israeli soldiers when they got back to Israel—while those on the boats were towed to an Israeli port and detained in isolation. The ceaseless stoking of fear and racial hatred—given full vent by the Israeli government and media in the days after the Mavi Marmara incident—has served to empower racist political demagogues such as Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, a camp follower of Meir Kahane. It has also effectively snuffed out Israel's old left-wing Zionist establishment.

"In Israel you have three systems of laws," the Israeli Arab politician Ahmed Tibi observes in the Blumenthal book. "One is democracy for 80 percent of the population. It is democracy for Jews. I call it an ethnocracy or you could call it a Judocracy. The second is racial discrimination for 20 percent of the population, the Israeli Arabs. The third is apartheid for the population in the West Bank and Gaza. This includes two sets of governments, one for the Palestinians and one for the settlers. Inside Israel there is not yet apartheid but we are being pushed there with ... new laws."

As Blumenthal documents, even Israeli Jews no longer live in a democracy. The mounting state repression against human rights advocates, journalists and dissidents has reached the proportions of U.S. Homeland Security. The overtly racist cant of the political elite and the masses—"Death to Arabs" is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches—has emboldened mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, to carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of 'suitability to the community's fundamental outlook.' " And all who denounce the steady march of Israel toward fascism—including Jewish academics—are attacked in organized campaigns as being insufficiently Zionist. They are branded as terrorists or collaborators with terrorists. As a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz read: "The settlers are the real government of Israel."

"Woody [a law school graduate from New York] became my initial liaison to Tel Aviv's radical left, introducing me to a loose-knit band of a few hundred anarchists, disillusioned ex-soldiers, disaffected children of ultra-Zionists, queers, academics, and generally idealistic and disillusioned young people who came of age during the Second Intifada when the liberal Zionist 'peace camp' closed ranks with the militaristic right wing," Blumenthal writes. "This tiny band of social deviants comprised the only grouping of people I met who sincerely embraced multiculturalism and who took concrete action against the discriminatory foundations of their country's political apparatus. Right-wingers and many Jewish Israelis who considered themselves part of the social mainstream referred to members of the radical left as smolinim, which simply means 'leftists,' but the word carried a deeply insulting connotation of an unacceptable caste, an Other. As branded social outcasts, inflexible in their principles, disdainful of ordinary politics, and brazen in their racial liberalism they resembled nothing so much as the pre-Civil War abolitionists."

The late Amnon Dankner, the former editor of Maariv, one of Israel's major newspapers, Blumenthal notes, denounced "neo-Nazi expressions in the Knesset" and "entire parties whose tenor and tone arouse feelings of horror and terrifying memories." David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, has called on Israelis to boycott the Knesset "to stand against the wave of fascism that has engulfed the Zionist project." And Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, says: "Israel's very existence is threatened by fascism."
The disillusionment among idealistic young immigrants to Israel dots the book. As one example, Canadian David Sheen is recorded as saying that everything he had known about Israel and Palestinians was, in Blumenthal's words, "a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination." But perhaps what is saddest is that Israel has, and has always had, within its population intellectuals, including the great scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who sought to save Israel from itself.

Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called "the conscience of Israel," warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.

"Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism," said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of the Jewish state and any hope of democracy. "Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution." He foresaw that "the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations." He warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn "concentration camps" for the occupied and that, in his words, "Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it."

But few, then or now, cared to listen. This is why Blumenthal's new book is so important.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

October 22, 2013

The above mentioned draft resolution has been brought to my attention by several concerned UCLA students. As a Palestinian-American businessman from Youngstown, Ohio who relocated to the occupied Palestinian territory following the now infamous Oslo Peace Accords which were signed back in 1993, I feel a deep obligation to share with interested parties several flaws this draft resolution incorporates.

The resolution notes a 2010 UC Regents affirmation "that it would not bring forward any discussion about divesting from companies that deal with the State of Israel until such actions were similarly adopted by the United States government." It goes on to state that "divestment resolutions at other UC campuses have had negative effects on campus climate." A reading of the state of affairs across the U.S., particularly of the Jewish American attitudes toward Israel as recently published in an October 1, 2013 Pew Research Report, shows a growing number of Americans, many out of their love for Israel, are calling for non-violent methods to be used to save Israel from itself. Even Secretary John Kerry initiated the current peace talk efforts by noting that the two-state solution has less than two years before it is lost. Nevertheless, it is most revealing that in a draft resolution promoting "positive investment" the drafters found it necessary to make arguments against divestment, as if the two are inherently linked. The fact of the matter is that blocking divestment is all that this resolution is about.

The proposal attempts to shift focus to "narratives" which is very disingenuous. The issue is not about narratives; every state that emerged from a colonial past, including the U.S., have multiple narratives that peacefully coexist. Instead, the issue here is the illegal Israeli military occupation that has dragged on for 46 years.

In multiple places the proposed resolution makes a glaring inaccurate comparison between "Jewish" and "Palestinian." It should be noted that Palestinians are both Christian and Muslim and if any comparison is to be made it should be equally made between all three monotheistic faiths.

The resolution refers to past resolutions that call for no action that will "develop a hostile and unsafe environment." I assume this would apply to UCLA taking no actions that would hint at supporting or covering up illegal practices by other states. If this is the case, I refer you to the long list of UN resolutions and the U.S. State Department Human Rights Reports which document a pattern of gross violations of international law and human rights violations by Israel.

The title of the resolution speaks of "positive steps" which are later detailed as actions to promote positive investment in Israel and Palestine. Not only does such an approach reinforce a rather outdated and artificial symmetry between Israel (the militarily occupying force) and the Palestinians (the occupied people who are protected under international law), but it also promotes a concept, positive investment, that does not require a resolution at all. Given the Israeli and Palestinian economies are open market economies, why would a separate resolution be needed if a sincere desire to invest rationally existed. Wouldn't that allude to the need of a resolution for every country on earth that the U.S. is not sanctioning? The fact of the matter is that the pro-Israel lobby has designed this seemingly harmless tool called "positive investment" which in reality is a façade to block the growing number of institutions which are divesting from Israel in protest of its ongoing illegal practices of dispossession, military occupation, and discrimination.

The resolution refers to specific firms which is rather odd. I know the business activities and executives in the majority of firms mentioned and it is misleading to believe all that they, or any private sector firm for that matter, do is good or bad. The issue is not to create an illusion of having symmetric investments, but rather to act in a way to cause the removal of the Israeli boot of military occupation from the necks of Palestinians. The EU, along with numerous US business and institutions, churches, and trade unions, have realized this and have taken actions, such as supporting divestment from Israel and firms operating in Israel, to hold Israel accountable. It is tragic that in today's day and age an argument to invest in Israel's economy, which would only reward Israel for its illegal practices, would even be contemplated.

Another linguistic flaw, purposely placed no doubt, is the comparison between the "State of Israel" and the "Palestinian Authority." Given 138 countries of the world voted to admit the State of Palestine into the United Nations last year, it is inaccurate to refer to the administrative governing apparatus called the "Palestinian Authority" when referring to the State of Palestine.

The resolution goes on to call for investments in companies and ventures "that have spent time and resources on efforts to facilitate cooperative interaction between Israelis and Palestinians by promoting economic and commercial growth for both groups." This nicely worded approach to an action statement is shockingly superficial. Pretending like the issue is the need for "economic and commercial growth for both groups" really strikes home all the previous points made above. The issue is not about "growth," it is about adopting non-violent tools to hold Israel accountable for its actions. Such tools, which were not invented by Palestinians, include boycotts, divestments, and sanctions. I would hope these tools, amongst others, become the focus of the discussion given my understanding that UCLA's voice is one that is expected to call for peace with justice, not merely peace, and surely not "growth" in place of justice.

I actually started writing this statement while on a flight from New York to London after spending one month on a five state speaking tour to present Palestinian investments to the American business community. From London I will fly to Amman to get back home to Ramallah. You may ask why I'm headed to Amman, given the Israeli airport in Tel Aviv is literally 30 minutes from my home. The reason is that I, an American citizen, am prohibited by Israel to use the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv because Israel blatantly discriminates against Palestinians, even if they are U.S. citizens, and forces all West Bank residents to enter and exit from a single bridge crossing to Jordan. It took me six hours to cross 3,452 miles over the Atlantic and six hours to cross the less than half a mile over the Israeli-controlled Allenby Bridge to get from Jordan to the West Bank. No amount of "positive investment" is going to expose the Israeli-made humiliation that happens during such border crossings, let alone the myriad of other daily acts of this 46 year old military occupation.

As I wrote in a Huffington Post piece titled, Palestine's Investments Require Divestment (07/25/2012), "Investment in Palestine -- without divestment from the Israeli occupation -- only continues to underwrite the status quo of military occupation." This statement is even more relevant today.

Thus, I strongly encourage you to see though this resolution for what it is, a slick bat to beat down the growing momentum toward divestment from Israel as a non-violent tool to encourage Israel to fall in line with international law and join the law-abiding community of nations.

Sam Bahour - Photo

About Me

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American based in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine and is managing partner of Applied Information Management (AIM), which specializes in business development with a niche focus on start-ups and providing executive counsel.
Bahour was instrumental in the establishment of two publicly traded firms: the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL) and the Arab Palestinian Shopping Center. He is currently an independent director at the Arab Islamic Bank, advisory board member of the Open Society Foundations’ Arab Regional Office, and completed a full term as a Board of Trustees member and treasurer at Birzeit University. In addition to his presidential appointment to serve as a general assembly member of the Palestine Investment Fund, Palestine’s $1B sovereign wealth fund, Bahour serves in various capacities in several community organizations, including co-founder and chairman of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy, board member of Just Vision in New York, board member and policy adviser at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and secretariat member of the Palestine Strategy Group.